Sweat shock
Rod Liddle has a radical explanation for Charles Kennedy's overheated performance at the Liberal party conference this week po or Charles Kennedy. These days it is a punishable offence to be seen to perspire in public. (And yes, that's right — Lib Dems and Tories perspire, Old Labour sweats — and New Labour just, oh, you know, glows.)
The beads of distilled Highland perspiration were right there in our morning newspapers, alongside 500 or so words bleeding faux-concern or simple glee. Just what is the matter with Charlie? Is it the drink? You do know about his drink 'problem', don't you? Or is the whole stress thing — the business of running a fairly important political party and having to do stuff like discuss policy with Norman Baker, or listen to Lembit Opik playing his guitar — getting to him? Is it sapping his health? Is he fit for public office? 'Gaunt, pale and perspiring,' wrote Greg Hurst in the Times. The Independent, rather charitably, put it all down to stage fright. And the Guardian's Sarah Hall wrote, [Kennedy] had clearly suffered some sort of violent sickness; he sounded hoarse and, during the 35-minute speech, mopped his brow three times.' (My italics.) Thrice! Mobilise those journo-docs for a few hundred more words on what sort of illness could possibly provoke a man to mop his brow three times in little more than half an hour. Beriberi? Ebola? Preeclampsia? The DTs?
Whatever it is that ails Charlie should, by extension, metaphorically ail all of us. It is part of the same disease which has seen Michael Howard attempt to become cuddly and lovable and caring, even without sorting out those weird vowels; it has transformed Michael Portillo from a viru lent Eurosceptical soi-disant member of the SAS into a warm, beaming New Man very much in touch with his feminine side. And of course there's Mr Blair: 'Hey, look, I have to make difficult decisions, OK? And I can do that. But I'm just a normal regular guy, right, and I like playing the guitar and listening to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.'
Charlie's valiant attempt to convince us all that be was wholly normal and not a) ill or b) pissed should not be dismissed as trivial, even though it patently is trivial.
I'm sorry for that apparent contradiction. The beads of sweat are lining up like tiny WMD bombs along my forehead, and the bottle of Jack Daniel's is grinning down from a shelf above the fridge. And yes, I know, it's only 10.30 in the morning. But I haven't lost my grip just yet. What I mean to say is that Charlie's perspiration is, of course, of no political import whatsoever and is the stuff of trivia. But his attempts to tell us that he is not really perspiring, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, both photographic and via intense and conscientious eyewitness reportage — reporters transfixed by those globules, as if they were the first whiffs of grey smoke from the Vatican or sudden tracer fire in some new war against another bunch of Arabs — by contrast, is quite significant. Because to perspire so, as Charlie did, is redolent of a lifestyle — or a constitution — which is politically abnormal. And for some reason it is assumed that we, the electorate, do not wish the politically abnormal to lead us. We want the normal to lead us. We do not want the ill or the pissed or the troubled. We want physical and mental conformity.
The sum total of Charlie's crimes against political normality is that a) he is known to like a drink and b) he had the misfortune to be 'violently' ill recently. But that's enough to have him damned. I have a faint memory, the ghost of a memory, that he once smoked cigarettes too, but my guess is that that little quirk, that political abnormality, has been expunged of late. (If it hasn't, I apologise unreservedly and will send him 40 Raffles in the post. But I suppose that of all the vices, Charlie's smoking should have been expunged, as the Lib Dems apparently wish to ban smoking everywhere, which is an interesting definition of the word 'liberal'.) But the drive towards some weird, imagined concept of normality is too strong even for a singularly independent mind like Charlie Kennedy's to resist. And so he — and his spokesmen — are forced to say how well he is and how he wasn't sweating that much and no, of course it's not the drink or the stress.
This is part of the same process which saw William Hague don a ridiculous baseball cap and jig up and down at the Notting Hill Carnival. My guess is that William would rather spend a day being repeatedly punched in the throat than attend such an event, but of course it doesn't do to say such things. It is assumed that people will think you odd and be less inclined, therefore, to vote for you if you don't enjoy the Notting Hill Carnival.
This ironing-out of idiosyncrasies has become pretty much ubiquitous. Wearing a beard is no longer allowed. Nor is smoking, drinking too much, not wearing a suit, or expressing a view which is counter to a sort of metropolitan received wisdom, even if that view may find much accord beyond the M25.
I'm not sure where this stuff came from. Perhaps it is simply that an absence of competing political ideologies has forced sterile conformity upon our elected members; that, and the forward march of television, a medium which lends itself to the bland and to the washed-out. But one shudders to think how Winston Churchill would have been received by the media today, or indeed the dry and ascetic Clement Attlee.
It is not so much that there are no 'individuals' around in politics; it is more the case that those who are possessed of an independent mind either succumb to internal party discipline or remain outside the fold, like Tam Dalyell.
It is this and not the silly notion of `yahboo' politics that demeans our political establishment and convinces the electorate that it is not worth turning up at the polling booth. In fact, there's nothing wrong with a bit of yah-booing. It's when they're all saying the same thing and all look the same and have identical interests and an identical world-view that we should really worry. And this is what we now have. Our elected representatives have become a homogenised morass. Quirks of thought or appearance or lifestyle have all but vanished.
So part of me rather hopes that those beads of perspiration on Charlie's forehead were there because the night before he had had one too many and, as a result, had got a stinking hangover. But I'm left with the terrible suspicion that this is well wide of the mark. My guess is that up there on the dais, under the big lights, Charlie Kennedy was perspiring so much because he was a bit hot.
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